Virginia Hughes

From urbandictionary.com:

1. aibohphobia: The irrational fear of palindromes.

Dude 1: Hey, what’s your name?
Dude 2: Bob.
Dude 1: AAAAAAAAAAH! *Runs and hides behind sofa*
Bob: Wow.
Dude 1: AAAAAAAAAAH! *Runs away and falls down stairs*

I can’t turn my head these days without reading about _____ going “green“: cars, skyscrapers (if that isn’t the biggest oxy moron…), hospitals, even weddings. The latest? Green prisons.

A low-security prison on Norway’s Bastoey Island—which uses energy from solar panels, makes most of its own food, and recycles galore—calls itself the world’s first “ecological prison.”

Its 115 inmates, who are allowed to roam the facility’s surrounding beaches, green fields, and nature preserve, and who do physical labor on the grounds, are encouraged to maintain these green habits once released.

“On a long-term basis, from a social and economic perspective, this is cheapest for society,” Justice Minister Knut Storberget told Reuters during a visit to Bastoey Island. The solar panels, for instance, save about 70 percent on energy bills. And the prison sells some of the food they make to other prisons.

But the most important aspect of the relaxed atmosphere, Storberget added, is to reduce the number of repeat offenders.

(Unfortunately, I doubt my country has the same objective. Thanks largely to the mandated sentencing that came about at the beginning of our all-mighty and never-ending “War on Drugs,” the number of incarcerated people in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1980, to 2.2 million, or about 726 per 100,000. In Norway, it’s 59 per 100,000.)

So far, researchers have identified five taste receptors on the human tongue that sense the following tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. The latter, which gives us that hearty mmmeaty taste, was discovered almost a century ago by Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University. But that there was a unique umami receptor wasn’t confirmed until the 1980s. Now, neuroscientists at NYC’s very own Mount Sinai have found the T1R3 “sweet” taste receptor, but in an unusual place: the gut.

These gut taste cells regulate secretion of insulin and hormones that regulate appetite, according to the paper published in the August 20 Early Edition of PNAS. Because sensing sugar in the gastrointestinal tract is the first step in regulating blood sugar levels, head researcher Robert Margolskee says the findings may help in designing new drugs for diabetes and obesity.

Now a related question for my reader-experts: When I was a neuroscience student, my professors taught me that the five receptors were found in patches in different parts of the tongue—sweet on the tip, bitter in the back, etc. But this surely doesn’t mean that if I put a chunk of salt on the tip of my tongue I won’t be able to taste it right away? Are the receptors actually found everywhere, but just clumped mostly in those areas?

Today’s factoid: Today’s human population is descended from about twice as many women as men. Wait, what? Ja! According to DNA evidence, males of the past were much more likely than women to die without reproducing. And this imbalance has led, over many generations, to behavioral differences between the genders, says Florida State psychologist Roy Baumeister.

For instance, why is it that groups of women never built a ship together and went off exploring new worlds? Baumeister answered in a speech given at the recent APA convention in San Francisco:

Taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies.

So why are men willing to take such risks?

Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).

That evolutionary reasoning seems pretty logical. Where Baumeister starts to lose me/piss me off is when he uses these arguments to explain today’s gender inequalities. Gender differences, he says, arise not from differences in ability, but motivation. Women can do physics, they just don’t want to. Men also want to work more than women, and that’s why they get the jobs with higher salaries.

More shake-your-head-who-is-this-guy bewildering is how Baumeister repeatedly refers to “culture” as something with agency, purpose, and direction:

Rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems — and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause.

Paging Richard Dawkins: If cultures “compete” with each other, then what is culture’s unit of selection? Moreover, what is this “cause” that a culture wants to advance? The whole idea is a bit too cracked out for my tastes. (And I don’t even want to touch his premise that religions and countries are meant to be competing against one another.)

New York Times columnist John Tierney described the speech as a “shrewd and provocative look at the motivational differences between men and women.” I’ll give him provocative.

Ron Mueck, an amazing 49-year-old Australian scupture artist, is good at turning heads.

Mueck started as a photographer, making models and then taking pictures of them for advertisements. According to one biography, he still has lots of these dolls stored at home:

Although some still have, he feels, “a presence on their own,” many were made just to be photographed from a particular angle—”one strip of a face,” for example, with a lot of loose material lurking an inch outside the camera’s frame.

He eventually decided that photography “pretty much destroys the physical presence of the original object.” So he turned instead to fine art, sculpture, and puppeteering.

The photos show “Mask II” (above), and “Boy” (below).

Mueck’s parents were toymakers.

(Hat tip: Megs)

The Earth’s oldest ice has been thawed, and its drippings contained fragments of very, very old DNA. Scientists recently brought this DNA back to life.

As he describes in a recent PNAS paper, microbiologist Kay Bidle and colleagues at Rutgers discovered DNA pieces in thawed chunks of Antarctic ice that ranged in age from 100,000 to eight million years old.

When they tried to make the bacteria “viable” again—that is, when they tried to get it to grow and reproduce in lab cultures—the researchers found that the older samples were much more fragmented than the newer ones. From these samples, they calculated a “DNA half-life:” The length of DNA fragments in the ice breaks in half about every 1.1 million years.

They attributed the DNA breakdown to its long-term exposure to cosmic radiation, which digs another nail into astrobiology’s Panspermia Hypothesis. The idea, which dates back to the writings of the 5th Century Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, is that the “seeds of life” are found throughout the universe. In 1973, the co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick proposed a “directed panspermia” theory: An advanced alien civilization, perhaps facing its imminent demise, intentionally spread small grains of DNA in random directions through the universe, some of which landed on Earth.

Panspermia, though an immensely popular idea in science fiction, has been widely criticized in the astrobiology field, mostly because the specific combination of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen necessary for life isn’t found widely in the universe.

Moreover, stellar winds and cosmic rays make space is a harsh environment for poor little traveling microbes. Biddle’s latest research seems to support this latter point. As he recently told Nature News: “If you take the speed of a comet and take the distance it would need to travel it would take longer than eight million years to do that. In a comet the DNA would be completely deteriorated.”

(For more astrobiology goodness, check out my Master’s thesis about the hunt for life on Mars.)